Approaching the terahertz regime: Room temperature quantum magnets switch states trillions of times per second

A class of nonvolatile memory devices, called MRAM, based on quantum magnetic materials, can offer a thousandfold performance beyond current state-of-the-art memory devices. The materials known as antiferromagnets were previously demonstrated to store stable memory states, but were difficult to read from. This new study, now published in Nature, paves an efficient way for reading the memory states, with the potential to do so incredibly quickly too.